Necromancy: The Art of Thanatos
For as long as man has believed in the spirits of the dead, he has
believed that there is some way to summon them, appease them, and interact
with them. Necromancy is any magickal technique which seeks communication
with the dead. The word literally means divination through the dead, and
in the ancient cultures of the Greeks and Romans, the spirits of the dead
were called upon to prophesy for the living.
There are a great many world-wide traditions which deal with the
spirits of the dead. Shamanism, for example, is an essentially necromantic
system. In primitive cultures, it is the office of the shaman to deal with
the spirits of the dead. He is also a healer and a spiritual guide for
his community. He is a diviner, able to predict impending plagues, droughts,
or other calamities, and he is the one who is responsible for guiding the
dying to the other world. Unlike ordinary men, the shaman can speak with
and interact with the denizens of the spirit world. In fact, it is the
shaman’s primary duty to serve as a kind of mediator between the fleshly
and the spiritual worlds. He bargains with the spirits, gains knowledge
and power from them, gives them offerings, and at times does battle with
them in order to protect his community.
A crucial part of the shaman’s initiation is a ritual death and rebirth.
During this initiation, often performed by the spirits themselves, the
shaman’s spirit leaves his body and passes over to the otherworld. Here
the spirits test him and often grant him special powers. He gains the
ability to see spirits in both realities and to interact with them. Certain
spirits claim friendship so that it will be easier for the shaman to call
upon them in the future. After this harrowing is finished he is returned
to his body, where he awakens a full shaman. At this point, he is
considered twice born and walks between both realities, physical and
spiritual, at once.
Another system which has necromantic overtones is the Tibetan Art
of Dying, also known as the Bardo Thodrol. This system officially dates
back to the eighth century BCE when the adept Padme Sambhava recorded
his teachings about lucid dying and the between places in a series of texts
now known as the Tibetan Book of the Dead. The Bardo Thodrol tradition
undoubtedly dates back before the eighth century, but Padme Sambhava was
the first person to actually commit the techniques to writing. Padme
Sambhava, wary of impending persecution, hid his texts away in a cave located
high up in the Gampo Dar mountain. The texts were then discovered by
Karma Lingpa in the fourteenth century and made accessible to the
Buddhist world.
The Tibetan Art of Dying is a very complex and intricate system,
and it really deserves more space than I am able to give it here. On
the most basic level, the Bardo Thodrol describes the process of death
and what comes after. It is a guidebook for the soul, providing what
amounts to a road map of the otherside to help the spirit of the deceased
get where he is going. Reincarnation is taken as a given as is the
immortality of the soul. The word "bardo" itself means a gap or a threshold
and in essence describes the between-place that is inhabited by spirits
who have moved beyond the fleshly reality.
The Bardo Thodrol is meant to be read aloud to the spirit of the
deceased so that he may not wander blindly in the between-place or become
earth-bound. The ultimate goal of the Bardo Thodrol is to help the
deceased achieve nirvana and, if this is not possible, then help him achieve
the best rebirth possible. Adepts of the system can see and interact
with the spirits much like a shaman. Very skilled adepts can also send
their spirits forth into the between-place where they can interact with
things just as if they were a spirit themselves. And because the Bardic
tradition devotes so much time and energy to understanding the process
of death, there is a great deal of useful information in the Bardo
Thodrol about spirits and the nature of the reality in which they exist.
Even spiritualism, that late nineteenth century passion, can be
considered a form of necromancy. Although it rapidly degraded into
little more than parlour tricks, the original aim of spiritualism was
communication with the dead. The medium who led the seance was someone
whose sensitivities were uniquely attuned to the spirit world. The
very word medium was meant to imply a mediator, someone who, like the
shaman, hovered on the threshold between worlds. Ultimately,
the spiritualists were seeking answers. They wanted to know what
death was like and what lay in the realms beyond. In that respect,
they were searching for many of the same things the Bardo Thodrol
addressed nearly two thousand years earlier.
Yet most people, if asked, would not equate any of these practices with
necromancy. Necromancy is almost universally considered a "black art".
The very word "necromancy" conjures images of cloaked figures huddled in
a graveyard, digging up a corpse. It is a repellent, gory, and morbid
art - or so most occult books would imply. Pagans and Wiccans have
nothing nice to say about the practice, condemning it as evil or at the
very best morbid. Christians tend to view it as Satanic, but I suppose
there’s nothing surprising about that. In their reasoning, anything that
is not a part of their religion must be against it. The closest we have
come in the last twenty years to a positive revival of necromancy would
be through the efforts of the New Orleans artist Leilah Wendall.
Wendall, founder of the Westgate Gallery on Magazine Street, has had
many personal experiences with an entity she believes to be the Angel
of Death. The Angel, whom she calls Azrael, has inspired her artwork
for over twenty years. It has also inspired her to develop a new
magickal system which she describes as "necromantic". She stresses
in her writing that her necromantic rituals are much more positive
than traditional necromancy and constitute a system uniquely her own.
The main difference between her necromantic rituals and those of
traditional necromancy is that Wendall’s work is focused on summoning
the Angel of Death. Traditional necromancy never gets that
specific: any of the dead will do.
Leilah’s system is very intriguing and has gained her a large following
over the years, but even she is careful to distinguish it from
traditional necromancy. So what is so awful about traditional necromancy
that it is universally shunned? First, there is the natural human
fear of death and the dead. Freud, in his Totem and Taboo explains
that most primitive cultures have taboos against touching the dead or
touching articles that belonged to the dead because they view death
as somehow contagious. He goes on to explain primitive man’s belief
that the dead are naturally jealous of the living, and that such jealousy
will drive even the dearest loved ones to murderous ends. They want
companionship on the otherside, and they will do just about anything
to drag their loved ones across into death with them.
A hint of this primal fear remains even in our sanitized modern culture.
Have you ever been to a funeral? How many people present could actually
bring themselves to touch the dead body? Did you reach your hand out to
see if you could? Think back to the choking combination of fascination
and fear that even thinking about it inspired in you. Death is
frightening. First of all, we have no control over it. Second of all,
there is no way for us to truly understand it until we ourselves have
undergone the process - and that in itself is an intimidating thought.
So necromancy, because it deals with death and the dead is automatically a
little unsettling. But there is more to it than that. Necromancy, partly
because of fear, partly because of ignorance, has experienced some very bad
press over the years. Like the superstitious dread that most people still
feel when confronted with witchcraft, our modern image of necromancy was
indelibly warped by the propaganda of the medieval witchcraze.
The Controversy of Historical Witchcraft
If you open any illustrated book which addresses the occult and flip to
the section on necromancy (presuming it has one) you will probably see
the following: it is a black and white picture showing two older men
standing out of doors in a magickal circle. The men are dressed in
flowing robes, and they are holding tools of the ceremonial magician’s art.
And both men look quite unnerved by the fact that a partly decayed corpse,
still wrapped in his funeral shroud, stands before the on the outside
of their circle. This is probably the most common depiction of Western
necromancy available to students today. The men are Dr. John Dee, court
magician to Queen Elizabeth the First and his assistant, the medium
Edward Kelley. Contemporaries of Shakespeare, Dee and Kelley conversed
with Angels, developed (or discovered) the whole Enochian system of
magick, and dabbled now and again in necromancy.
Before I address what historical necromancy was considered to be in Dee’s
day, allow me to say a few things about the European witchcraze. The
history books tell us that for a period spanning the 16th and 17th
centuries, priests and witchfinders scoured Europe and put to death
thousands of individuals believed to be practicing witchcraft or other
heretical arts. This so-called "witchcraze" although not officially
part of the earlier Inquisition, had a great deal in common with the
fanatical killing zeal of the Inquisition. The actual number of
individuals who were tortured, hung, or put to the stake varies
depending on your source from a relatively small 100,000 to approximately
9 million innocent souls over the course of the entire bloody period.
The witchcraze, like the Inquisition, was a Christian phenomenon. The
Christian-ruled empires were struggling to survive the Dark Ages that
came after the fall of Rome. Christian kings and princes ruled by Divine
Right. This was the belief that the Christian God granted them the right
and power to rule above ordinary mortals. Because the kings were given
their power and authority from the Christian god, any religious system
that did not recognize the power of this god was also in danger of not
recognizing his followers’ power. And so the Jews, the Moors, and any
surviving Pagans and fertility cults, were persecuted and destroyed across
Europe.
The witchcraze is an ugly portion of our history. In modern times, it
is an historical period whose actual facts and events are still hotly
debated, and a lot of personal convictions clash in those debates.
Feminists see the witchcraze as a largely misogynistic phenomenon started
by men who feared the power of women and sought to keep them under control.
Many Christians struggle to reconcile the atrocities the forefathers of
their faith committed in the name of an inherently peaceful religion.
Some Christians still try to defend the actions of the Inquisitors and
call for similar purgings to take place in our modern age. Jews and
Muslims tend to view that period of history as just one more instance of
persecution over a long and terrible road of wrongs done to them in the
name of religion. And of course the Pagans and Wiccans, whose religion
seems to have been the most persecuted by the Christians, look back
upon what is known of that period and vow never again the burning times.
Yet one issue that has still to be resolved about that age, even in the
minds of Wiccans and Pagans, is whether or not there was any truth to
the allegations of witchcraft leveled against so many women and rural folk.
The Pagan community is divided on this notion. Originally, one of the
main precepts of Wicca was the fact that it was the Old Religion. The
first modern witches believed that what they were practicing was a religious
system that had existed for hundreds if not thousands of years. The
Gardnerian and Alexandrian systems especially claimed to stem from an
hereditary line of witches that stretched back even before the Burning
Times. Most academics hotly dispute this claim. Even academics who are
largely sympathetic to modern witchcraft, such as Jeffrey Burton Russell,
still insist that the witchcraft of the witchcraze was a delusion. The
whole phenomenon, stemming as it did out of religious persecution,
xenophobia, and misogyny, was all in the Christians’ heads. The fact that
a number of women confessed to be witches only seals this argument in the
mind of the academics, because, as numerous scholars point out, most of
those confessions were derived under extreme torture with the torturers
putting the words that they wanted to hear in the mouths of the poor
confessants.
I have studied the period of the witchcraze for many years now and have
gone over arguments for and against the notion of an hereditary craft
till my head hurt. The greatest weakness I have found in the
arguments of those who feel no such "Old Religion" ever existed, is
the fact that they want physical, written proof of beliefs and practices
to be found. As one word on this religion, outside of the writings of
Inquisitors and the confessions of their victims, has not been found to
exist, they take it as proof that the religion itself never existed.
My answer to that argument is simple: if the religion was as persecuted
as we must believe it was, then it would make sense that no one would
keep a written record of their beliefs. A written record, either
letters or diaries or magickal books, would be dangerous in the extreme.
There would always be the risk that such writings would be found and
become immediate proof that the owner was a witch. Also, it is
understood that the Old Religion was a religion of the country folk,
and in the Middle Ages, only the nobility and the clergy could read and
write. If you are going to find a book from that era, chances are it
was a book being kept safe in a monastery somewhere. Further, that
book was probably produced by the monks themselves. Such books were
very strictly censored so that they could not contain material offensive
to the Christian faith. Finally, a legitimate religion can exist as
an oral tradition. Oral traditions can survive for hundreds of years
before they are ever written down. The Torah (Old Testament) was a
document that was passed on verbally for many generations before it was
ever committed to script. As long as there was a priesthood devoted to
remembering the word of God, there was an Hebraic tradition. So is
it so much of a stretch to think that a religion could have existed
even though there is no written documentation telling us about it? If
any books did exist, the Christians would have burned them or the monks
would have snatched them up, and rewrote them just so they could write
out the overtly pagan material. It was done with works like Beowulf,
so why not others?
Academically, however, all of what I just put forward is pure speculation.
I have no written, documented proof to cite for my assertions, therefore
in the realm of the scholar, I have no proof at all. Personally, I
believe that there was a pagan religion (in fact, several) in existence
during the time of the witchcraze, however, I admit that this is more
personal conviction than provable fact. In the end, the debate will
continue because the events occurred so far in the past that there is
really no way to know. However, there is one thing that I and the more
traditional scholars of the witchcraze agree upon: the Christians
and their Inquisitors were definitely putting words into the mouths of
the so-called witches. Witchcraft, as it is described in the confessions
of the witches as well as in the numerous tracts written by witchfinders
of the day, is at best a twisted vision of what was really being practiced.
What is the Truth?
Witches in the Middle Ages were believed to sign a pact with the Devil
for their powers. They were believed to gather in great orgies in the
woods at night, and at these so-called Witches’ Sabbats, they were
believed to slaughter and eat infants, engage in perverted sexual
activities, and work spells to bring plagues, famines, and other evils
to the land. Numerous tracts on witches and witchcraft, written by
Christian experts, asserted all those things and more. The Malleus
Maleficarum (or "Hammer of Witches"), a famous tract on witches from
the 15th century even made the claim that witches (who were almost
invariably women) had the power to steal men’s genitals. The witches
then kept their pet penises in little nests hidden away high up in
trees, feeding them on honey, milk, and blood.
What does any of this have to do with necromancy? The summoning of
spirits was of course one of the many charges levied against the witches.
Necromancy was apparently practiced by certain members of the
Church - but it had to be sanctioned. In 13th century Florence, Niccolo
Consigli was tried for practicing necromancy without a license. This
implies that the art was allowed and accepted so long as it was
performed within certain limitations of the law. Richard Kieckhefer,
in his book Forbidden Rites, tells us that many of the clergy practiced
the summoning of spirits. Sometimes they were looked down upon by their
fellow priests, but for the most part it was believed that if anyone
could practice such arts and remain uncorrupted by them, the clergy
could do it. Notably, one of the major necromantic grimoires to have
been produced in the medieval era is the Grimoire of Honorius - attributed
to no one less than Pope Honorius himself!
Yet the so-called necromancy that appears in these early grimoires
rarely requires the necromancer to shed blood or mutilate corpses.
Most of the evocation which appears in the texts is pure ceremonial
magick, the kind heavily influenced by Qabbalistic teachings and the
Solomonic tradition. In most, although not all, of the spells, the
goal of summoning is to gain knowledge and information. So where does
the notion that a necromancer must wallow in body parts and blood arise
from? Where, indeed.
As far as the witchcraze was concerned, there was no distinction between
someone who practiced witchcraft and someone who practiced unlicensed
necromancy. Without the sanction and power of the Church, you could not
work magick. Period. Anything else was considered an infernal art.
Those who practiced unsanctioned magick were invariably considered to be
in league with Satan and working (ultimately) toward the destruction of the
One True Church. In fact, the word necromancy was at one point completely
interchangeable with the word nigromancy, -- a catch-all term for any
of the black arts in general. Just as the writings of the day described
what the Christians believed the witches were up to, so too did those
tracts include the Christians’ view of the necromancer’s art. Writers
like Cornelius Agrippa, whose Three Books on Occult Philosophy is still
in circulation today, paint a very dark picture of the necromancer indeed.
The Influence of Agrippa
Agrippa, writing in the early portion of the 16th century, tells us that
necromancy "worketh all its experiments by the carcasses of the slain,
and their bones and members, and what is from them, because there is in
these things a spiritual power friendly to them." (Tyson, 606). He
tells us also that the necromancer uses blood to call up spirits, and
when a body cannot be obtained, a fresh blood sacrifice will do. As
dictated by Christian afterlife beliefs, Agrippa could not admit that
the spirits of the righteous could be summoned through necromancy.
(There was a huge debate among medieval scholars about whether the witch
of Endor could have actually called up the prophet Samuel as he was one
of the Lord’s chosen and should have been protected from such summoning
by that Lord). But Agrippa believed that it was possible to summon the
spirits of the damned and perhaps those wandering in limbo. And
because the necromancers dealt only with the spirits of the damned, it
is implied that they themselves are damned also.
The best place to summon such spirits, Agrippa tells us, is at a
crossroads or at a similarly dark, isolate, and barren locale. Agrippa
also tells us that necromancers will often haunt places of execution,
sneaking in under cover of darkness in order to cut off choice bits of
murderer and thief to use later in various spells. Graveyards are not
safe either, as necromancers will enter places of the dead at night
and dig up corpses with the express aim of resurrecting the spirits
and forcing them to reveal hidden treasure.
Edward Kelley and Dr. John Dee were working off of Agrippa’s information
when they tried their experiment in necromancy. There is some debate
as to whether or not the experiment actually ever took place. Both
Kelley and Dee attested to it, but as they were the only ones present,
everyone had to take their word for it. Supposedly, the dead man they
sought to summon rose up bodily from the grave and stalked toward them.
Kelley and Dee were safe in their magic circle, but they were close
enough to the animated corpse to get a good look at his sunken cheeks
and glassy eyes. Dee almost fainted dead away. Very little came of the
experiment aside from a little question and answer session with the corpse.
Kelley and Dee, however, were immensely pleased with themselves and
bragged about the incident to no end. It should be noted that although
many respect Dr. Dee as a legitimate magical worker, his partner Edward
Kelley was a renown showman and trickster and might not have been above
faking the session just to impress Dee (who, incidentally, was his major
source of income).
So what does this tell us about our traditional view of medieval
necromancy? I think Agrippa indelibly shaped the popular image of
necromancy, and further, I think that image is very misleading. Agrippa
was writing to impress a very Christian audience with his magickal
knowledge. His first drafts of his masterwork were sent to the Abbot
Johannes Trithemius as well as the abbot of Saint James at Wurtzburg.
Both of these men, particularly Trithemius, studied the magickal arts
themselves. It has been suggested even that Trithemius was Agrippa’s
mystical mentor, primarily in the art of evoking spirits. Trithemius
and the abbot of Saint James would have been among those clergy
whose magickal experiments were accepted and even sanctioned by the
Church. As such, it would suit them to have their unsanctioned rivals
calumnied in print. Agrippa may have sacrificed accuracy in favor of
giving his audience what they wanted to hear.
Out of the Coffin
We have already established that much of the medieval perception of
witchcraft was formed through Christian propaganda and ignorant
speculation. So, too, do I think the necromancy described by Agrippa
and his contemporaries is only a skewed version of an actual tradition
that existed prior to that time. The blood and the bones and the
exhumed corpses, like the infamous witches' Sabbat, were sensational
fabrications designed to shock the populace and condemn an art the
Christian regime objected to. Interestingly, it is only after Agrippa’s
writings were published that grimoires began to appear which contained
bloody, corpse-ridden rituals that pretended to be necromancy. Even
the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage, though it purports to have been
written in 1458, exists only in a copy which Mathers dated to the end
of the 17th or beginning of the 18th centuries. Another grimoire
containing necromantic material, the Red Dragon Grimoire, I think very
clearly demonstrates the negative influence Agrippa’s work had on later
writers.
The Red Dragon Grimoire contains a ritual for summoning a dead man
which, among other things, requires the necromancer to dig up a grave
with his bare hands in the middle of winter, expose himself to the
elements for hours on end, and throw exhumed bones into a Church during
midnight mass - and then run like hell before he gets caught. Reading
rituals like that one makes me wonder if they were ever intended to be
performed at all - or if the writer was trying to create the strangest,
goriest and most gruesome effect imaginable just to see if someone would
be stupid enough to try it. In cases like the Red Dragon Grimoire and
others, it is almost as if the writers of the later grimoires were trying
to tailor their necromancy to fit the spooky stereotype established
by Agrippa.
Necromancy, as a spiritual art, is not what these sources make it out to
be. While it is definitely a darker practice, there is no need to
relegate it to cemeteries and crossroads. Like the art of the shaman,
necromancy is basically threshold work. Its magick takes places in
that liminal state between living and dying, and most of its power
comes from this very liminality. The conjuring of spirits for
divinatory purposes is actually only a small and relatively unimportant
part of necromancy. The real work comes from the necromancer’s contact
with death and with the transformative power of death. There is
power released in the falling apart of things, and like the medlars
and sorb-apples celebrated in D.H. Lawrence’s poem, some things only
achieve their fullness by falling through the stages of decay.
Necromancy is not about bones or blood or putrid corpses. It is about
reaching across from one state of being to the next. The necromancer
is not some grave-robbing black magician but a shamanic initiate who
harnesses the between-state for the power of destruction and recreation
that it brings. If we are to explore this fascinating and liberating
magickal art, we have to explode our preconceptions of what it is,
and to do that, we have to abandon the ghost-stories told to us by
Agrippa and other contemporary writers. Rather than looking at the
texts which are clearly an outgrowth of the witchcraze era, we should
look within, where life and death meet inside ourselves, to truly
understand where to begin.
Michelle Belanger
setanankhu@aol.com
www.kheperu.org